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Little love left for Melbourne in asphalt jungle

Greg Baum

Time was when Bernie Ecclestone thought Melbourne was a quite nice piece of asphalt, rushing by on his screen every March. Photo: AFP

IT'S been a tough week for octogenarian billionaires everywhere. Frank Lowy and Bernie Ecclestone both are 81. Rupert Murdoch turns 81 next week. Clive Palmer is of indeterminate age, but, counting by chins, is catching the others fast.

This quartet might think that at their age, they deserve some respect, even a little forelock-tugging. Instead, they are getting grief, some of it from one another. In fact, two of them are doing such a brisk trade in grief they are thinking of offering shares in it.

Bits of Murdoch's family keep drifting away. So do bits of his empire. So does his mind. It wasn't like that in the good old days. The behaviour of Lowy and Palmer is so infantile that it could only be put down as second childhood. On Wednesday, Palmer set up the Palmer institution, as opposed to the Lowy Institute, and as good as announced he planned to put Lowy in it. Relatives are starting to wonder if they should hide their planes and yachts from them, for safety's sake.

But the saddest case of all is Ecclestone. Time was when he thought Melbourne was a quite nice piece of asphalt, rushing by on his screen every March. Now, Melbourne is such a bitch. By the time he realises that his alarm clock is not his heart monitor and struggles out of bed into the freezing London pre-dawn, and finds his glasses - how could anyone misplace THOSE glasses? - the race is half over. In formula one, of course, that is not such a problem, because at the halfway point, the cars invariably are in the same order as on the starting grid.

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Still, even when the race is run, it's so damned cold and dark. Ecclestone's solution is not to turn on his lights, but to demand that Melbourne puts up its own lights, at its own expense, and turns them on. That way, he can sleep in. If Melbourne won't, he knows plenty of quite nice pieces of asphalt with the names of Asian cities written on them who will.

The fact is that Ecclestone has gone off Melbourne the way he went off Slavica three years ago. On Wednesday, he talked about Melbourne in terms of divorce. He has his eye on a new, younger and more fertile partner, preferably Asian, like Murdoch's.

Certainly, no one could argue that there are not irretrievable grounds for the Ecclestone/Melbourne parting. A simple, but bizarre piece of maths demonstrates it. Every year, the Victorian government pays Ecclestone an ever-increasing sum for the privilege of staging the race. This year, it will be about $55 million. Yet the more Victoria pays Ecclestone, the less viable the race becomes to him - he said so this week - and the greater boon it is claimed to be for the Victorian economy.

This is despite inexorably diminishing crowds and interest, and the almost total absence of evidence that the event was anything other than an inconvenience to the city and a drain on the state.

But the Australian Grand Prix Corporation is nothing if not a tart. Last week, it gave away 70,000 free tickets to this year's race. It said this was to compensate locals for their inconvenience. Locals were more suspicious than touched. For 15 years, the corporation had drowned out their protests. Suddenly, it was showering them. To some of their minds, it was a desperate attempt to have the Melbourne grand prix catch Ecclestone's ever roaming eye one last time.